It began, as these things often do, as a chance remark, in a blog. Now it has grown to a Web-wide search for
the best software people alive and dead. The best ever.

The tiny acorn was born when Tim Bray in his popular Ongoing blog described Adam Bosworth - of Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, IE4, then BEA and now Google fame - as "probably one of the top 20 software people in the world."

The search for the remaining 19 began, and resulted in a list of forty nominees that are now being discussed and voted on by anyone interested in i-Technology and its software development pioneers.

Currently the leading twenty as of Monday morning 5:00AM EST are as follows (but obviously it is changing by the hour as votes come in):

Jeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

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Most Recent Comments

Duty Editor12/15/04 08:31:40 AM EST

von Neumann is on the newly expanded list that will be released for a second round of voting shortly. We thank the IT and CS communities for the many and various suggestions, and believe that the wider, deeper list will find favor with almost everyone, though one or two omissions will be inevitable even in any expanded selection (the new voting includes a field of over 110 contenders...including Jogn von Neumann.)

PF12/15/04 07:36:46 AM EST

How could John von Neumann be left off this list (if Alan Turing is on it) ???

Duty Editor12/15/04 02:33:45 AM EST

Joe thanks for the excellent feedback. Please take a look here to see how this exercise has now been widened and deepened thanks to reader input like yours. A second round of voting will shortly begin...on a field broadened to include 90% of the suggestions you make here, along with many, many more from among the hundreds of suggestions we received over the past few days.

Joe12/14/04 06:10:52 PM EST

I think you missed a lot of the major influences on software:

- Relational databases, how about adding Edgar F. Codd?
- Development of high level programming languages: Dijkstra would be the right guy here...
- Object oriented languages: Alan Kay for developing the root of modern OO languages, Smalltalk.
- Modern operating systems: Professor Corbato did ground braking work on OS's that all modern OS's rely on.

just to name some of the obvious ones, of course there are many more...

I don't agree with all your choices

- Martin Fowler takes a lot of wrong credit here: UML, was mainly created by Ivar Jacobson, Grady Booch, and James Rumbaugh. XP would be Kent Beck. Marting Fowler wrote a couple of books and articles about these topics...

- Don't know if Linus belongs here. All he did was writing a Kernel to emulate a 30 year old operating system. Hardly innovative...

- Guido van Rossum invented a scripting language. Althoug I like Python I don't think that it deserves to be in this list. Stuff like Relational databases were slightly more important...

- Andy Tannenbaum and Minix? See my comments on Linus...

- Brian Kernighan: AWK can be hardly called a programming languages. It's the "duct tape" of operating systems and should be banned...

- What is Tim O'Reilly doing here? He gave us animal on computer book covers??

Brendan Johnston12/13/04 04:38:54 PM EST

Relational databases are important so Codd should figure.
GUI's are important, how about Alan Kay?
Pattern's are much talked about, what about Ward Cunningham?

Top 2012/13/04 09:19:37 AM EST

My vote goes to linus torvalds three times over.

Founding fathers12/13/04 05:05:09 AM EST

You mean Vincent Cerf, "The Father of the Internet" himself - co-inventor with Robert Kahn of TCP. Yes, certainly one of the all-time Top Twenty. Not sure if this list requires you to be alive though. (Ah no, Turing's there so yes cerf needs to be added.)

BroaderWiderDeeper12/13/04 04:56:02 AM EST

Interesting to see how many language authors are here - Python, C, C++, Java, etc...but the real "top software people" are surely those who produce the underlying concepts, rather than the language implementations

TBL, yes. But what about those who gave us TCP and internetworking in the first place?

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